Brent Noorda RN, BSN, BSEngPh
Nursing Portfolio
Overview 2
Credentials 6
Recommendations and References 9
Nursing School Records 10
Sample Nursing School Projects 14
Educational Tools for Nurses & Students 18
Training Materials for Care of Stroke Patient 24
Material from a Cancer Patient 25
Overview
• Introduction
• Resume
Brent Noorda, RN, BSN, BSEngPh
brent.noorda@gmail.com - www.brent-noorda.com/resume
I am seeking a nurse position, in the Tampa/St Petersburg bay area, where I can maximize the quality of care that I, and everyone involved with care, can provide to our patients. To reach that maximum quality of care I hope to follow two simultaneous paths: First, is to continue in a variety of nursing positions to hone my skills and to learn as much as possible about how to meet the needs of patients, families, aids, nurses, and physicians. Second, I want to use my experience as an engineer (systems- and software-engineer) to improve the care and outcomes of patients; i.e., to improve patient care by optimizing EMR processes, providing caregivers more accurate and efficient access to information, and more time for giving care.
It took many years to realize that I needed to become a nurse. Even during my first career as a computer programmer and entrepreneur, I always felt the greatest satisfaction when I could provide personal care (e.g. tech support) to a person in need. As a foster and adoptive parent of children with physical and emotional needs, I learned the rewards of giving emotional and hands-on care. As the family member caring for multiple ailing relatives and interacting with so many great nurses, I realized that their profession was my calling and it was time to switch careers. Although computer technology and nursing are very different professions, I have found that many of the management, communication, leadership, and critical thinking skills carry over and have helped me become a better student, classmate, caregiver, and nurse.
If you’re looking for a dedicated, hard-working, hard-thinking, empathetic and non-judgmental nurse who loves taking care of patients, and who wants to bring in engineering talents to improve the healthcare experience for everyone involved, please contact me.
Brent Noorda, RN, BSN
brent.noorda@gmail.com - http://www.brent-noorda.com/resume
St. Petersburg, Florida, USA
Education
Samuel Merritt University - Oakland, CA - May 2017
Bachelor of Science in Nursing
• Summa Cum Laude - GPA 4.0 (including SMU and all prerequisite courses)
• Student Representative to SMU administration and faculty
• Member of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing
• Clinical Sites spanning 7 hospitals, 3 EMR systems, and 1 Telehealth center
University of California - Berkeley, CA
Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics
• Highest Honors
Healthcare Licensures and Certifications
• RN - Florida Board of Nursing, Lic #9492196, exp Jul 2022
• RN - California Board of Registered Nursing, Lic #95135569, exp Oct 2020
• BLS/CPR/AED - American Heart Association, exp Nov 2020
• ACLS - American Heart Association, exp Nov 2020
• PALS - American Heart Association, exp Aug 2019
Registered Nursing Experience
RN, Medical-Surgical Orthopedic Unit - Palms of Pasadena Hospital – Dec 2018 - Apr 2020
• Perform assessments, wound care, pain control, intakes, and discharges for 5-6 pre-and post-surgical patients.
• IV, IM, enteral, subcutaneous and oral medication administration and documentation utilizing EMar and Alaris pumps.
• Educate patients regarding their medications, procedure and treatments. Provide preoperative, inter-operative and post-operative care instruction.
• Electronic documentation of patient plans of care, assessments, I/Os, safety, incidents, and progress.
• Graduate of StaRN nurse residency program.
• Multiple DAISY Award nominations.
RN, Order of Malta Oakland Clinic – Mar-Aug 2018
• Patient intake & outpatient follow-up.
• Monitor records and coordinate among care across facilities for mammogram program.
Service Experience
Highlights of volunteer efforts to impact lives and communities:
Ray & Tye Noorda Foundation – 2013-present
• Board chairman - Reorganized and staffed foundation for 12-year spend-down with large annual grants for education, health, and poverty relief
Tri-City Mental Health Human Rights – early 2000s
• Chaired committee overseeing human rights issues for Tri-City Mental Health clients in Middlesex County, Massachusetts
• Performed site inspections, client interviews, and violation reviews
Foster/Adoptive Parent – 1990-present
• Fostered and adopted two children with mental challenges and abuse histories
Computer Programming / Engineering Experience
Multiple positions, companies, and clients: 1980s-present
All areas of the software industry:
• Programmer: hardware-level drivers to full-stack internet products
• Product Manager: design and team leadership for internal and commercial products
• Manager: from products to teams to founding four companies (with two acquisitions)
• Consultant: products always ahead of schedule and under-budget, and always of highest quality and reliability, currently including software for NASA’s most advanced satellite
for expanded software career experience, see www.brent-noorda.com/enginurse
Relevant skills demonstrated during career in computer technology
Communication
• Wrote technical manuals and sales brochures
• Speaker and panelist at industry conferences
Teamwork
• Mediated between strong, diverse, conflicting personalities for effective cohesion
• Collaborated in industry standards bodies
Critical Thinking
• Repaired complex multi-component systems in real time
• Created monitoring tools used to quickly assess and diagnose hardware and software errors
Attention to Detail
• Developed fail-proof software selected by NASA to control the most complex and expensive satellite ever launched
Leadership
• Experienced project leader, manager, startup founder, and CEO
• Role model to employees and coworkers for working together for the customer
• Invented and promoted the technology now used by almost all interactive web sites
Credentials
• RN Licenses
• Certifications
o BLS (CPR & AED)
o ACLS
o PALS
RN Licenses
Florida
California
Certifications
BLS (CPR & AED)
ACLS
PALS
Recommendations and References
Letters of Recommendation and References are available on request.
Because these materials contain the personal information of third parties, they are not included in this online portfolio.
Nursing School Records
• Diploma
• Transcript
Sample Nursing School Projects
• Presentations
o Moral Distress
o PICO: Aerosolized vs IV Antibiotic…
• Nursing Cohort Advice about Sharing
• Pinning Speech
• Patient Write-Ups
Sample patient write-ups (pathoflows, lab analysis, medication organization and reconciliations, IPRs, and Client Workups) are available on request. They are not included here because even with personal identifying information removed, some patients or family members might think they recognize themselves in the cases.
Presentations
Moral Distress
Powerpoint to lead senior synthesis discussion on moral distress in nursing. The discussion led to some very distressing events that we, even as student nurses, had contended with regarding moral choices and how wearing they can be.
Full presentation: brent-noorda.com/portfolio/moral-distress
PICO: Aerosolized vs IV Antibiotic Delivery for VAP Prevention
It would make sense to deliver the antibiotics only where they’re needed (directly to the lungs), rather than systemically, wouldn’t it? But does the data support this theory?
Full presentation: brent-noorda.com/portfolio/pico-aero
Nursing Cohort Advice about Sharing
Our first few weeks in nursing school were a mess. Of the four dozen students in our cohort there were probably four dozen different ideas about what assignments were due when and how we should be preparing for each day of class. Although the instructors used a fancy Learning Management System, that LMS was set up to optimize the instructors’ time, not the students’ time (time which should have been used for studying, not for figuring out what the heck was going on).
Then I put together a few principles about how a cohort should work together to share knowledge about schedules, requirements, and nursing. The most useful part was the concept of a cohort homepage, where we could edit and see just what we had to be doing at any moment. Here is what our cohort homepage looked like on one particular day:
“Nursing Cohort Advice about Sharing” is a document I created for any group (nursing or otherwise) to succeed together. The cohort following ours used the advice and did better than we did. The cohort following theirs is doing the same. I hope this can be useful to any group sharing in an educational experience.
URL: brent-noorda.com/nurse-cohort-sharing
Pinning Speech
I was both honored and punished to be voted, along with my favorite classmate, to give our end-of-year pinning speech. Here’s our time in nursing school summed up in one speech and slideshow.
As seen from the audience:
URL: youtu.be/ed9cG0jRv5M
Emphasis on the slideshow:
URL: youtu.be/azLbtlQJMmI
Educational Tools for Nurses & Students
During nursing school, and while fulfilling the prerequisites, I could not always find the learning tools I needed, so I would create them. Often these were appropriate only for our particular class or cohort.
These are a few of these nursing tools useful to nursing students anywhere.
• Anatomy Memorization Flipchart
• Adult Standard Labs
• NANDA Short List for Mobile
• Axon Action Potential
• EBP Poster: Music for Pain & Anxiety
Anatomy Memorization Flipchart
I found Anatomy Lab to be, by far, the most difficult class in all of nursing preparation. Memorizing terms (and names, and languages) is just not my forte. I tried numerous flashcards, books, websites, and apps, but none of them was working for me.
So, I made this tool based on showing sections of anatomy (as plagiarized from our textbook) with terms all either showing or not showing. As a web or mobile tool, one can instantly flip back and forth between the two views, checking their memory on one or multiple related terms together.
It worked for me (I got an A+), it worked for my class (grades were 10% higher than in previous semesters), and I’ve heard from students since then that are using it.
URL: brent-noorda.com/medical/anatomylab
Adult Standard Labs
There are a few standard values that every nurse just needs to know. The flashcard technique used for anatomy memorization easily lent itself to memorizing these standard values. I still revisit these slides about once a week to stay fresh.
URL: brent-noorda.com/adult-standard-labs
NANDA Short List for Mobile
For many nursing students, being forced to use diagnoses that match a pre-approved NANDA list seems artificial and like a waste of time. However, I believe that it is a good exercise in teaching new nurses how to think about the immediate and nurse-addressable needs of the patient and family.
It is certainly true that, in the clinical setting, it’s not easy to pull a NANDA term out of the air. The following tools makes that possible. With a cell phone and a link to this list, it is easier to quickly drill down to a proper NANDA diagnosis.
URL: brent-noorda.com/nanda-short-mobile
Axon Action Potential
To understand the signals needed to trigger the action potential in an axon, and so see how the sodium and potassium gates and ions are involved in that trigger and its recovery and refractory period, is complicated business. Years ago, some instructors wrote a program to simulate excitable tissues to students. The program allowed students to change parameters (e.g. Na+ or K+ or poison concentration) to examine the effects. For example, excessive extracellular hyperkalemia will be seen as a cell that is always depolarized but never fires.
The problem with the simulation was that it was written to only run on DOS computers that are decades old. To share this old DOS program with we students, our physiology professor had to lug around old, slow, heavy DOS computers. What a pain!
I was determined to make this simulation available to students with modern web access anywhere. By plugging together pieces of DOS simulation software others had written and made available through open source, I was able to get this acceptable web-based version of this simulator available to anyone, anywhere. No lugging DOS computers required.
URL: brent-noorda.com/axon-action-potential
EBP Poster: Music for Pain & Anxiety
My hospital did not have radios or music on the TV, but I did have an iPhone with a subscription to Spotify (and I didn’t need a prescription to use them).
Five months into my new nurse career, five patients led me to a new appreciation of the therapeutic effect of music. Each patient was experiencing high levels of pain and/or anxiety through long, difficult hospital nights... I’d exhausted every possible medication and order... They were exhausted… I was exhausted… Nothing worked…
Until pulled out my iPhone and found the right Spotify playlist for each one:
• the confused patient from Brooklyn, who could not stop shouting, moaning, and crawling out of bed until she received treatment from Dr. Frank Sinatra. I don’t know where in her mind she went, but I pictured her on a brownstone stoop, holding hands with her first boyfriend
• the southern, religious woman whose unrelenting pain kept her awake until the Gatlin Brothers chimed in
• the old woman with dementia and a broken hip, needing constant two-hands-on support to remain safely in bed, until the Mormon Tabernacle Choir allowed me to keep only one hand in hers, freeing my other hand to do charting
• the opioid-dependent shoulder replacement, shaking for hours on end in a fetal position, but quickly falling asleep to Tony Bennett duets
• In only one case did the playlist fail to help. The patient chose Michael Bolton, and Michael Bolton did not deliver!
This poster was created for my nurse residency program, to share what I’d learned with my fellow new nurses. (P.S. Since that time I’ve had a LOT more success with music for my patients, and I’ve learned that 9 times out of 10, Frank Sinatra put’s ‘em to sleep.)
Full presentation: brent-noorda.com/portfolio/ebp-music
Training Materials for Care of Stroke Patient
A couple of days after receiving an RN, my mother-in-law, Carol, had a stroke resulting in her returning home with left-sided hemiparesis. After attending to her immediate needs of hydration and nutrition, I put together training materials for fellow nurses (our recently-graduated classmates) to prevent atrophy and spasticity, activate neuroplasticity, rebuild muscles, and eventually get back to standing and her first initial steps.
• ROM & PROM in-bed exercise chart
These visuals, copied from many sources, were hung in a large chart on the wall, e.g.:
URL: tinyurl.com/in-bed-rom
• Video Playlist for left hemiparesis/hemiplegia care & rehab
As Carol progressed beyond bed exercises, still diagrams were no longer enough for we new-nurse caretakers to learn proper techniques. So, I created a playlist for us all to learn from, using many videos available on the web. Many of those were for right hemiplegia, so I reversed the video (but not the text) to apply to left hemiplegia.
Video Playlist URL: tinyurl.com/left-hemi-care
Material from a Cancer Patient
Soon after receiving my RN I learned that I had throat cancer (oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma). After two months of radiation and chemotherapy, and then many more months of recovering from what those two months did to me, I’m now gratefully showing no signs of cancer and feeling fully recovered.
Going through this experience as a patient should be worth at least an extra 10 credits of nursing school. For myself, I hope it will make me a better nurse: more empathetic, tolerant, and knowledgeable.
And for others going through this experience, I created a few things during my ordeal that I hope will help.
• Patient’s Brain
• Tips for my nurse-self, from my patient-self
• (Attempting to have) Fun with Cancer
o Facial Grooming for Head & Neck Radiation Patient
o Medicine’s Big Bang (How the Universe Began)
Patient’s Brain
Nurses often use what’s called a “brain” to manage the complexity of caring for multiple patients simultaneously. The brain is usually just a sheet of paper, arranged in a personal style, for checking off what needs to be done with each patient, what is complete, and extra information to be transferred later to a chart or HCP. As a student nurse, I learned that the right brain can make very complex care a lot more manageable.
As a cancer patient, I soon became overwhelmed with the number of tasks I needed to perform every day just to take care of one single patient: myself. My care team consisted of radiology, oncology, surgery, dentistry, speech therapy, and nutrition, with each specialty adding its own set of medications, exercises, and other interventions, and each specialty needed feedback. The task of caring for myself quickly became overwhelming.
I thought: what if each patient had their own brain, much as a nurse uses a brain? So, I put together a few prototypes, e.g.:
URL to full set of templates: brent-noorda.com/pt-brain-templates
By filling in the brain as each day went along, I felt I finally had a handle on my care. Even so, as you can see in these examples, I almost never got everything done on any day (it’ hard!):
URL to full set of brains: brent-noorda.com/pt-brains
Please feel free to use these templates however they may be of help. Now the question is: should we turn this into an app?
Tips for my nurse-self, from my patient-self
I hope to be a better nurse by remembering what I learned as a patient:
• Forgive your patients and their families for their behavior. You are seeing them at their worst moments. They’re not usually like this. Really.
• Your patient is probably not absorbing all of your instructions the first time. Repeat whenever you can. Add written instructions and keep them simple.
• Just because your patient has been instructed to do so-and-so, doesn’t mean they do it. Following instructions at home is a lot of work, especially for someone who is sick and weak.
• Don’t immediately assume what any signs and symptoms are telling you, and don’t assume you know the cause of any side effects. Yes, you have years of education and experience guiding your assumptions and so your assumptions will usually be correct. But they won’t always be correct. So always ask yourself, “what else could it be?” and take the time to dig deeper.
• Tell your patient what you’re about to do and how long it will probably take. While performing the procedure, communicate with your patient now and them to keep them updated and to know how you’re feeling. Communication is the quickest way to shortcut anxiety.
• Don’t forget what your patient is going through. Being sick sucks. Being very sick sucks a lot.
• You’ve seen this kind of thing a lot, and now it’s ho-hum. For patients and their families, this is probably their first time and it’s a big deal. Use your experience to educate them, but without trivializing what they’re feeling.
• Your patient may have a second major problem going on, completely independent of the one you are there to care for. Once again, don’t assume.
(Attempting to have) Fun with Cancer
Nothing is so bad you that you can’t have a little fun with it, not even cancer.
Facial Grooming for Head & Neck Radiation Patient
Just because you lose a few hairs shouldn’t mean you don’t look your best. A little creativity, and a little Vaseline, go a long way…
URL: tinyurl.com/well-groomed-patient
Medicine’s Big Bang (How the Universe Began)
It’s not the treatment that’s so bad, it’s the side effects, and the side effects of the treatments for the side effects, and… before you know it, you have… everything!!!!
URL: tinyurl.com/med-big-bang